McDonagh is arguably one of the most celebrated yet most controversial of contemporary Anglo-Irish playwrights. His plays have received mixed reviews from critics and audiences alike, mostly for featuring graphic violence and obscene dialogues. Even though comedy is mostly seen as an inferior genre compared to tragedy, McDonagh, among many…[Read more]

This is the proposal for ‘Reading Materials: Pots, Plaster, Poetry, and the Press, 1766-1861’, a (putative) panel for MLA 2024. Individual paper abstracts and other materials will follow.

This essay argues that an antiracist, anticolonialist Victorian studies must remain open to universalizing claims of the kind found in early works of queer theory, particularly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Although recent work in queer studies (as well as literary studies generally) finds inspiration in Sedgwick’s…[Read more]

“Steven Schroeder’s most recent collection of poems, Still, offers an amazing juxtaposition of imaginary elements and sensible phenomena that keeps the reader turning page after page in wonder. Poems of varied textures, from Zen-like shorts to lengthier narratives, offer shifts in perspective that surprise and delight, many with seasonal beauty or…[Read more]

The title of this collection, taken from the poem with which the collection closes, calls to mind Helen Frankenthaler’s description of the places where colors converge on raw canvas in her “soak-stain” paintings. That closing poem is a meditation on her “Seven Forms of Ambiguity” in the “1940s to Now” section of the Crystal Bridges Museum in Ark…[Read more]

Exhibition Catalog for “learning to see nothing: new and recent work on paper and canvas,” by Steven Schroeder. Eleanor Hayes Art Gallery, Kinzer Performing Arts Center, Northern Oklahoma College, Tonkawa, Oklahoma, 4 September – 18 October 2018.

The forty poems in this collection have percolated through more than forty years of meditation on “city” that began when I was an undergraduate studying with Richard Luecke at Valparaiso University. The title, In the Path of Totality, references a phrase made familiar by media coverage leading up to the total solar eclipse that was visible acr…[Read more]

The forty poems in this collection have percolated through more than forty years of meditation on “city” that began when I was an undergraduate studying with Richard Luecke at Valparaiso University. The title, In the Path of Totality, references a phrase made familiar by media coverage leading up to the total solar eclipse that was visible acr…[Read more]

China is the occasion, not the subject or the object, of the forty-seven poems collected in Steven Schroeder’s Fallen Prose – lyrical glimpses of the “new” city in Southern light. Most of the poems in the collection are set in Shenzhen, a few in Zhuhai, Macao, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong – and one or two a bit further west, in Kunming. All attend…[Read more]

There is an all at once quality to lyric poetry that makes it akin to mysticism. It knows there is more to vision than meets the eye. It takes the whole world in while knowing the whole of it is always known imperfectly, always here, always now. The here and now of the seventy-one poems in Steven Schroeder’s new collection is most often Chicago,…[Read more]

There is an all at once quality to lyric poetry that makes it akin to mysticism. It knows there is more to vision than meets the eye. It takes the whole world in while knowing the whole of it is always known imperfectly, always here, always now. The here and now of the seventy-one poems in Steven Schroeder’s new collection is most often Chicago,…[Read more]

In the spirit of the old Shaker hymn, the poems in Steven Schroeder’s new collection turn and turn – from a question Laozi raises to Woody Guthrie’s holy ground, from Chicago to Texas to Shenzhen to Macao, in conversation with poets and philosophers from Euclid and Thoreau to Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Gertrude Stein, Buddy Holly, Lyle Lovet…[Read more]

In the spirit of the old Shaker hymn, the poems in Steven Schroeder’s new collection turn and turn – from a question Laozi raises to Woody Guthrie’s holy ground, from Chicago to Texas to Shenzhen to Macao, in conversation with poets and philosophers from Euclid and Thoreau to Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Gertrude Stein, Buddy Holly, Lyle Lovet…[Read more]